First minecraft was plugged from the teamfortress.com blog, then 2 days of penny arcade were devoted to it, and since then it's been coming up every few days on slashdot and Boing Boing. The servers have been wrecked like 40% of the time from the constant barrage. If you like minecraft stop telling people about it!

From what I understand, the speed issues of Minecraft are not so much due to Java but the poor OpenGL bindings available to Java applications. According to Notch (Minecraft's author), the engine computations themselves are only slightly slower than they would have been in C++.

Obviously the author is going to say that, but you can take the opinion of anyone who codes a game in Java in the first place with a big fat hefty grain of sand. In any case, *whatever the reason*, not using Java would have gotten rid of that problem.

Really? My draw distance is set to "far" which is as high as it'll let me set it. I'm playing on a computer who's cpu is a few years old, with a cheapo graphics card, and 4 gigs of RAM and I get no noticeable lag in regular play. Single player that is. I had 2 gigs of RAM when I first started and the client would slow a little some times because it was competing for memory. But now I've got enough extra that I have yet to see it stutter or anything.

Well my macbook pro running Windows 7 with a Core 2 Duo 2.17ghz with 3 gigs of ram and a Radeon x1600 has a hard time on anything but a short draw distance.
My HTPC which is also Win7 but has 3 gigs of ram, AMD 64 x2 4200+ and a Radeon HD 5700 has no problems maxed out.

Guess what? Hidden surface determination [wikipedia.org], including Occlusion Culling is hard(tm), even for completely static scenes!Don't forget this game has a fully modifiable world and lighting (through torches) making it even harder.

I picked up this game a few days back (after this story and finding out about the world size and mine carts...) and I have to say the lighting in this is actually really cool.

What turned me off before was the limited size of the world you were in. Now it's just amazing in scale... if only we could get some DF like minions to push around and maybe some better fluid dynamics I'd stop playing DF: I'd feel bad for Tarn Adams, but that's the way it goes.

Actually MC was compared more than once to DF. Due to the fact it's totally deformable, and red dust circuits give you a lot of complexity for traps and devices.In case you've only tried the free version, there are sometimes free weekends for the alpha, in which the fluid dynamics are a bit better but still not in the level of DF.

Someone even wrote a DF->MC converter so you could import your fortress for a nice 3d visualization:)

I wonder how hard it will it be to bring all that into MC... Doesn't reall

I've been tinkering with different cart boosters and trying to come up with some kind of mine cart death machine seeing how enemies and animals just love to jump into carts. My latest efforts led me to a cart that goes just outside the bounds of calculation though and it's getting me to think more about building my own DF/MC clone with my multi-threading and multi-processing experience. The only caveat to that plan is that I also suck at graphics.

Actually I'm pondering doing the same as well! in my little to none spare time... (and I guess more than a dozen others).Picked up a couple of tutorials on OpenGL 2.0+ (with 3.3 as my target) and it's really quite fascinating how much the world has changed since I originally played a bit with graphics.About the art itself...... I hope to get some friends to help.

So, good luck to you and hopefully the journey will be interesting and fun:)

The dynamic world continues to generate for awhile after you begin playing. Obviously Java is crippling but there are some serious computational problems being solved. Water starts in seed areas and flows outward until it meets walls at the exact height of the start point, and stops there. How would you do that quickly for a 4 billion sq km area?

It doesn't actually work this way - it only computes a smallish area around you and generates as needed from a fixed random seed (so going back to an old area will be the same) + changes you have made.

minecraft allows for unlimited power for the circuits using redstone wires. [minecraftwiki.net]
there was flow logic before redstone using falling sand, however, these types of circuits require you to refill the source of the flow (sand), every time you wanted a new computation done.

This isn't much of a limitation for dwarf fortress logic. As long as you have sufficient power an axle can transmit state to any distance on the map. water flow has evaporation and flow rate issues that make it best to use in small units actively pumped from an aquifer. The big thing holding back DF CPU complexity is the massive amount of stuff going on at any one time in a fortress of significant size that will bring the simulation to a crawl.

It shows a repeater on that wiki page that extends the range. Not surprisingly it also introduces a slight delay. You could extend the signal as far as you want with enough repeaters and as long as you’re willing to tolerate the delay.

There's a tool that you can produce in the game called redstone dust that you can use to make what's basically wires, and it's the way it works makes it possible to create logic gates and such, which are the building blocks of computing. It's not a particularly efficient way of computing, but it can certainly be functional.

The purpose of the electrical stuff was obstinately for much simpler reasons: Control of in-game elements. Doors open/close when powered, power can set off explosives and alter the direction of mine cart tracks. You have buttons and levers and pressure plates to provide temporary power and the red torches provide constant power unless powered themselves.

Boolean logic is just so simple that it doesn't take much more to implement a whole computer based on it.=Smidge=

I spent 30 minutes building a simple 2 bit alu but I gave up building it in minecraft after 3 hours. The main issue is that everything runs in this global clock cycle. Evey torch you have in a path acts as a "tick" You also have to have a torch evey 15 spaces for a "refresher" so your putting down an inverter Evey 15 spots. Even those this 16-bit alu is impressive I bet the reason his data bus is so long is to equal

Even those this 16-bit alu is impressive I bet the reason his data bus is so long is to equalize all the bits so they come out at the same time.

They DON'T come out at the same time. That's plainly evident in the video. It's not clear if the thing even has a clock generator.

I was thinking about the difficulties regarding timing as well - especially important if he plans to add memory cells or anything with a shared bus. Some kind of buffer + "operation done" signal would be needed, since even careful plannin

There's also a whole buncha interesting stuff in the links on the left. As another poster points out, people have been inventing things like this in freeform sandboxes since things like freeform sandboxes were invented, but IMHO it doesn't make any of these less impressive. Personally I was just happy with trapping invaders in an automated obsidian-encasing mac

Would it be possible to create a version of Nemesis that doesn't suck?

Nah, it would be hard to make a Nemesis that doesn't suck. Instead just re-watch, or check it out if you've never seen it, what is arguably the best film in the franchise [imdb.com] and try to forget Paramount's lame remake attempt.

Discovered this game a few days ago. Have amassed a few items in survival mode, and have found a good hiding place, and buried them.
This morning I snuck into someones home and stole a chest of items. Sitting at work now, I feel like I've actually stolen something from a local shop(not that I ever have). And thats the point, the game offers something so fresh. Tonight I could find my items raided.

This is survival multiplayer, not the free-build mode, which does not appeal to me at all.

Some of our local LUG people have gotten bit by the minecraft bug. We've built a massive multiplayer island. Some of the locations include Lua Beach, Torvalds Torrent, FreeBSD falls, and Xen caverns. We also have logic gate fields, where members are working on a binary adder. Working already are various logic gates. One of our members built tux out of blocks (who also doubles as a water slide!).

This game is soooo addicting. Don't get sucked in. The best phrase I've heard describe minecraft went something like this... This game is crap. It is full of bugs and nothing works. I hate it, hate it, hate it! I'm logging in right now.

Actually, having bought the game a few days ago... I have run out of pieces! I'm playing the single player Alpha and I can't find enough iron to satiate my hunger for an epic mine cart subway. I end up making iron picks to mine more iron and can't find enough to keep digging at a respectable pace. I could always use stone picks... but they just don't last. I could turn 3 of the 5 diamonds I found into picks, but that feels like a waste for some reason. Maybe I just need to gain more patience digging an

There's a glaring mistake under the diagrams where he talks about not naming this ship the Enterprise and giving it a different Naval Construction Contract (NCC) number. The USS Galaxy's NCC number was not 1700, that belonged to the USS Constitution in the 23rd century. The Galaxy's was 70637.

There are no "saves," unless you make periodic backups of the data files. There is one save file per world, and it us updated fairly frequently. It's not like an FPS where you can quicksave any time and restore to that point when you screw up.

That's part of what makes the game more challenging, IMHO. You can respawn but you can't reload. If you drop your stuff in a pool of lava just forget it - because man, they're gone.=Smidge=

Voxels are, well, 3D pixels, pixels with volume. There's some good reasons to want to use them and a few games were big on the idea. However GPUs don't handle them, and thus their use has mostly died. However I think that's how this game builds things. That means they have to be pretty large, to function at a reasonable speed. If all the voxels got real tiny your CPU would die under the weight of all the calculations.

Personally I'm still trying to get what the big deal is, I've tried the Java version of the

The free version is basically just a demo of the engine. In the paid version it's called the creation mode. There are no gameplay elements in it. It's just a sandbox. There are other modes in the paid version like survival and multiplayer survival that add stuff like collecting resources, crafting items and fighting monsters among other things.

They're all in Java. The freely available version played in your web browser sucks and isn't at all representative of the fun you can have with the real game (though note that it's still in alpha and very buggy).

There is nothing to actually "play" in free version, which is basically just a world builder. In the paid version, there is a "survival mode" that actually has stuff like hitpoints, crafting, reason for building your house/base, mining, farming (if you like to), exploring, etc.

I have only played the single-player mode in Minecraft Alpha. It's hard to describe exactly what makes it so compelling. The best thing i can think of is its sense of adventure.

You're dropped into a randomly generated world with nothing but your fist. The terrain generator makes these fantastic landscapes that, while not always entirely Earthly, are usually quite engaging and natural: forested rolling hills, rocky islets, mountains with waterfalls (which have effective and consistent physics)...and dark foreboding caves, sometimes a small hole in a hillside, other times a straight-down pit you almost have to fall into to see. You never know what you'll find just over the next rise.

It's up to you to bootstrap your survival. You've probably seen the Penny Arcade comics, so you know the basics: punch a tree, get some wood, craft some tools. You'll want to find some coal for torches and make a safe house before it gets dark--that's when the monsters come out. And because the combat is so basic, the outcome of every mob encounter is always in question. Zombies aren't so bad, but skeletons, spiders, and the sneaky creepers can ruin your night pretty quickly.

It's a sandbox game, but it's also a little like Sim City or even an RTS: if you want to build stuff, you first have to collect the resources to do so. Any block can be removed from the game world, provided you have the right tools, and any block you've gathered can be placed wherever you like. Iron ore can be smelted (after you've crafted a furnace) into better tools; there's also rarer stuff like gold ore and diamonds the further down into the earth you go.

And that's where Minecraft really shines: down in the caves. You'll find mazes of twisty little passages, all alike. You'll find huge rooms with water- or maybe even lava-falls in them. You may come to a dead end with a dirt wall; dig your way through it and you might discover a whole new set of tunnels. Wherever you go down there, you'll need to light your way with torches. Not only do they let you see pitfalls and baddies, but their light keeps more monsters from spawning. I have never played a game where the darkness was so fear-inducing. It's surprising just how tense I get when I have a pocket full of ore, but I'm lost deep below the surface, running out of torches, and my last pickaxe and sword are almost busted. Conversely, the rush of happiness and sense of reward if I survive and find my way to daylight is just as magnified.

So there's that sense of adventure, and there's also room for lots of individuality. There is no in-game map to hold your hand, and there are as many methods to (try and) keep yourself from getting lost as there are players. I play on a MacBook Pro, meaning my render distance is pretty short, so I tend to use trails of torches above-ground to lead me from my fort(s) to working caves. Inside the caves I'm working out a system of double and triple torches in various configurations to keep myself oriented. Other people build arrows out of cobblestone or dirt, or wall off certain branches for later, or heaven knows what else. You're forced to deal with the challenges the game world throws at you, but you can do it however you like. What's the point besides exploration? Well, you can build a minecart roller coaster or a giant Sphinx, or just a homey little cottage. Whatever you build is entirely individual, since as you say you're basically working with big-ass voxels. I like expanding my houses sometimes, but the real fun for me is in the exploration.

Oh, one more thing. The game is currently in Alpha. It has no right being even mildly playable, and instead it's the most engaging game I've played in a long time--in fact I can't remember the last time I was up until 5:00 AM playing a game before this. When Survival MultiPlayer starts to come together (it's playable but players and mobs can't deal damage yet) it's going to be a big deal. I'm having so much fun in my own worlds, I can only imagine what it'll be like exploring with a group of friends.

Probably pointless to post this this long after the original posting, but the developer explains that the reason the game is so low-tech is because he's a programmer, not a graphics artists, and he figured this was a good was to make the game more visual than Dwarf Fortress (one of the game's influences), but still within his capabilities.

Makes sense, but I would have expected something so popular to attract an artist or two. Even still, you don't have to be an artist to generate tiling textures large enough to not see the individual pixels/through/ the MIPing

That's a really good point. In minecraft you're never stuck spending time fiddling with offsets or whatever to get textures to line up just right, or really worrying which wood texture you want for this door. You've just got a few basic options, so you pick one and it looks as good as everything else and you just keep moving with your construction project.

Also while having such a basic toolkit can lead to the problem of everything looking sort of the same, it also forces more creativity in the spatial desig

Listen, if he didn't build this by placing one block at a time, over and over again for 42 weeks straight, eschewing any actual human contact the whole time, all the while subsisting on nothing but doritos and mt. dew, stopping only to urinate and post screeds against the RIAA; well then he is not a true geek and I reserve the right to not only be unimpressed, but also to be judgmental and/or dismissive of him.